The present invention relates to systems for dispensing articles such as documents and particularly to a system in which the currency dispensers of two adjacent automatic teller machines may be shared between the two machines under certain operational conditions.
A currency dispenser for automatically dispensing a required amount of money as desired by a customer-operator of the machine is well known in the art. However, the reliability of a currency dispenser is of extreme importance, particularly when the currency dispenser is not supervised in any direct manner. For example, considerable inconvenience may be caused to customers if, upon the entry of authorized-customer requests, the machine fails to operate because the dispenser malfunctions or is out of cash.
The present invention relates to article dispensing means and is specifically adapted to minimize the down time of a currency dispenser in an ATM by selectively sharing that currency dispenser with a currency dispenser in an adjacent ATM. Such sharing of the currency dispensers in adjacent ATMs will automatically occur when one currency dispenser is either out of service because of a malfunction or out of currency.
The background art known to the applicants at the time of the filing of this application is as follows:
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